What Political Campaigns Know That Nonprofits Don't

Every month, political campaigns raise hundreds of millions of dollars online. They move fast. They test everything. They know what works. And most nonprofits are still trying to figure out if they should send an email this week.

That gap has been on my mind for years. Why are campaigns so effective at digital fundraising? And why is the social impact sector so far behind?

But here’s the thing: Political campaigns aren’t perfect. In fact, they get a lot wrong. The churn and burn tactics. The fake urgency. The impersonation schemes that drain trust from the entire ecosystem.

So the question isn’t just what can we learn from campaigns — it’s what should we take, and what should we absolutely leave behind?

To explore that gap, I wanted to talk with someone who’s got a foot in both worlds. Someone who’s run some of the biggest and most successful political campaigns in the country—and who’s also building something different.

Mike Nellis is the founder of Authentic, a digital agency that’s raised over a billion dollars online for progressive causes and candidates. He’s worked as a Senior Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris and on presidential campaigns for Obama and Biden. His client list includes Adam Schiff, Cory Booker, and the United Nations.

But he’s also someone who nearly killed himself doing this work. For years, he was buried in anxiety and depression, using food to cope until he weighed 600 pounds. Over the last four years, he’s lost over 300 pounds and completely transformed his relationship to the work.

That journey taught him something critical: You can’t sustain this kind of work through misery. Now he writes with what he calls “endless urgency” — a philosophy about moving fast without burning out, about choosing resilience over destruction.

And he’s proving you can build attention at scale without a massive team. His Substack has grown to over a million followers. Just him. A laptop. And the right strategies applied with relentless consistency.

In our conversation, we dig into what campaigns know that nonprofits don’t. And just as importantly — what they’re getting dangerously wrong.

Notable Quotes
"The biggest thing that moves the needle is volume. It matters a lot more how many times you're posting than the quality of the content." — Mike Nellis [6:25]

"Running an ethical and effective fundraising program that's rooted in storytelling can raise you a lot more money than the churn and burn stuff. If you build it over time, you raise more money." — Mike Nellis [5:46]

"I can't stop Donald Trump from being the tyrant that he is. But a lot of times people ignore their physical and mental health, ignore their family, ignore their community when they could strengthen all those relationships. You want to make the world a better place? You start bottom up." — Mike Nellis [30:57]

Timestamps:

[00:00] Introduction
[02:12] Political vs. nonprofit fundraising: What's different?
[05:02] Building meaningful relationships over churn and burn
[06:25] Volume matters more than quality in the attention economy
[09:06] The culture problem: Why nonprofits move too slowly
[10:38] Bulk buy acquisition: An ethical dilemma with no solution
[11:15] Is there a breaking point coming for digital culture?
[13:59] The impersonation problem and bad faith actors
[14:49] Why the digital cliff won't come
[16:44] Building a million-person audience with a team of one
[17:21] Joe Rogan's content ecosystem and the clip economy
[18:34] "I'm the same asshole in every room": On authenticity
[20:22] The Russian nesting doll theory of content
[21:57] Mid-roll: About Cosmic
[22:53] Why nonprofit leaders need to communicate like humans
[23:59] The distrust of intellectuals and academia
[25:14] Simple messaging wins: Build the wall vs. the blah blah blah act
[27:37] How social change actually happens
[30:24] The concentric circles model: Self, family, community, world
[31:30] Why local action matters more than national outrage
[33:04] Raising good men in a world of bad role models
[34:39] Andrew Tate and the young men crisis
[36:06] School shootings and focusing on what you can control
[36:43] Choosing to be a joyful warrior
[37:25] Why the Democratic Party can't become the party of grievances
[38:54] Where to find Mike

P.S. — Feeling a disconnect between your mission and your brand? Cosmic helps social impact leaders build trust through story-rich brands, compelling campaigns, and values-aligned strategy. Let’s talk about how to elevate your impact: https://designbycosmic.com/

Full Interview

Eric Ressler: Mike Nellis, thank you so much for joining me today. Really excited to have you on. I think the first thing I want to dig into is that you have a pretty unique vantage point in a lot of different ways. You’ve done incredible work with fundraising through your agency and personally. You’ve also worked with both causes and candidates. I think I want to start there. When you work with political candidates, what is the different way of thinking about that work compared to working with a nonprofit organization or a cause?

Mike Nellis: I think the foundations of it are roughly the same, right? You’re trying to create an emotional connection with people that makes them want to part with their money and support what you’re doing. And ultimately, I know that that’s maybe a crasser way of thinking about it, but that is at its core what it is.

Now, I think with political causes, as opposed to our clients—we work with the United Nations, we’ve worked with Red Nose Day, we work with a bunch of others—there’s much more logic to, I think, fundraising. And when you create content, there’s a lot more of an expectation that people understand where that money’s going and how it’s being useful. And on the political side, that content doesn’t perform as well in my opinion. It doesn’t perform poorly, but it doesn’t perform as well.

And so I think politics becomes more visceral, emotional. It’s part of the reason you see—and we don’t run these style programs—but you see these programs that are really based in anger and churn and burn and, you know, donate now or all hope is lost or all that stuff. I don’t think that works as well on the nonprofit side because people want to feel hopeful in terms of the donation they’re given. They want to be like, I’m giving you 25 bucks, we’re going to help save the ocean. We’re going to support abortion rights for women across—this is a lot of what we do with the United Nations is helping with reproductive rights and freedoms and healthcare in Africa through the United Nations Population Fund.

So I think people want to see progress, whereas on the political side, it’s much more—it’s like playing whack-a-mole sometimes on people’s emotions, which sucks. And the system shouldn’t work that way, but you kind of have to live in the world you live in.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. And we recently had Amanda Litman on the show and we talked about this a little bit too. She’s awesome. Really great interview. You should check it out. We are seeing though, I think the bad sides of political fundraising start to seep into nonprofit fundraising, or at least I’m starting to see that a little bit. You know, things like outrage, fake urgency, these kind of empty promises around donation matches, which may or may not actually happen.

And I think to me, I see this as a tie into just a bigger cultural phenomenon around the attention economy and just how noisy everything is right now and what it actually takes to break through. And in my opinion, this is kind of unsustainable. And I think we’re all starting to feel that this kind of almost runaway experiment of social media and digital platforms that we’re on. How are you thinking about balancing all of that showing up in a way that’s true and honest and authentic, which we’ll get into that word a little bit more today, but also effective at the same time?

Mike Nellis: Yeah, if one more person says the word authentic to me, I get a free set of steak knives, I think. So I desperately want to build a meaningful relationship between my clients and our supporters. And if you look at the clients that I think have been the most successful at that over time, they’re usually the ones that you’d be surprised at the list size.

Right. That turns out as much money. We’ve worked with United We Dream for a long time. Much smaller list than you would expect given their fundraising. It’s true for a lot of our other nonprofit clients too. It’s even true for some of our larger clients too. I mean, Adam Schiff, who is my oldest client, I’ve been with him for 10 years, has a massive email list, but just has this gigantic following of people.

So if you want to create that type of alignment between you and your supporters, you have to spend more time on it. You have to do it right. And in my view, running an ethical and effective fundraising program that’s rooted in storytelling can raise you a lot more money than the churn and burn stuff. The difference is the churn and burn ones are usually from campaigns and organizations that don’t have a good story, aren’t interested in being patient, aren’t interested in building that connection.

If you build it over time, you raise more money. That’s why Adam was able to raise so much money for his Senate run. That was a 10 year project, essentially. We might not have known we were building it for that, but we got to a point where we could do that. What we did with Kamala in 2019 for a presidential election raised something like 30 million dollars, I think for her campaign at the time. What Bernie Sanders did in 2016, you build those connections, you get people to donate more money more frequently.

The challenge is that in this attention economy that we’re in, and I know this now as a content creator, the biggest thing that moves the needle is volume. It matters a lot more how many times you’re posting than the quality of the content. You have to self-police on quality. There’s a lot of creators out there, and God love them to death, they’re posting one video a week or one video a month, and it’s beautiful, detailed really really good and their growth is dead because the algorithms are demanding that you post regularly and so that’s why if you go to my TikTok page you’ll find a lot of videos of me in my studio with my phone in front of my face just complaining about what happened that day in the news.

It’s because I got to feed that algorithm and frankly I don’t do it enough. The truth is I probably post on average on Instagram and TikTok once per day when I should be doing it three to five times per day based on the algorithm, but I have a throughput problem. My throughput problem is time right now—time and attention and creativity because I also run my businesses and do this and I have a six year old. So there’s a lot of that.

I think the same problem with fundraising, right? The text messages in particular are completely out of control and it’s part of the reason that Apple is essentially creating a spam box for everybody’s phone to get rid of a lot of those. And I think it’s going to hit the nonprofit sector harder than it’s going to hit the political sector because political speech is going to be considered free speech and probably rooted outside of that over time, which would just be my guess. And the nonprofits are going to get stuck right into it. And that’s going to be a huge problem, but it’s a problem of our own making, frankly.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, I mean the text messages are definitely getting out of hand and there’s good work being done there. I think even on ActBlue’s side, we’ll see how it actually pans out. But at least it seems like some good faith motion towards more responsible data sharing and performance and things like that. I’m like a lot of people, I’ve donated to many campaigns. I get easily 10 plus text messages even though I’m actively trying to opt out every single day. And it’s to the point where I literally don’t even read them anymore. Right, because there’s just the volume is so much.

Volume is something I would like to spend a little bit more time on because you mentioned having to kind of feed the algorithm in order to break through in this attention economy that we’re in. When we’re talking about, let’s say executive directors of small teams at nonprofits or social impact orgs where you tell them a weekly email is a good idea and they start to get overwhelmed. How do we move the culture and the understanding and frankly, the belief in how important communications work is as it relates to fundraising and just social change in general, when it’s been traditionally this kind of piecemeal, “we’ll get to that when we have time, we’ll get an intern to do that.”

And I know this is not true necessarily for larger campaigns, but I think often people would be surprised how small some of the communications teams are, even in bigger teams.

Mike Nellis: I mean, there is a culture problem here, which I think a lot of nonprofits move very slowly. One advantage I have as I’ve worked in Democratic digital fundraising for so long is I move really fast at everything that I do. The name of my Substack is literally Endless Urgency. And that is not unrelated to the career that I’ve had.

When I work with these nonprofits, they’re hoping to get one email out a week. They’re hoping to get two emails out a month or something like that. And it’s just not enough. If you—this is the issue. We have this problem with our campaigns, particularly when we get towards August, September, October of an election year. If I on average send for my clients, I would guess anywhere between 25 to 30 emails a month, which is a lot less than a lot of my competitors. Now my emails are better written, in my opinion, they get a higher donation rate than a lot of my competitors.

The difference is that a mothership style program is going to send 100 emails that month in an election year in the election months. Since August, September, October, they’re going to send like 400 or 500 emails to people, they’re going to overwhelm your inboxes. So if I stay at 30 high quality emails, I’m going to get even more drowned out than I already am in order to get people’s attention. So I have to scale up and go to 100 in October, which is ridiculous.

So I’m beholden to the ecosystem that exists that drowns people’s stuff out. I have to worry about spam inboxes, I have to worry about deliverability. So everything’s just a lot more complicated. And a lot of the problem with the nonprofit world is they have fallen dramatically behind in terms of keeping up with best practices for volume, deliverability, tactics, scale, stuff like that.

On acquisition too, a lot of nonprofits are very opposed to doing bulk buy acquisition. I hate bulk buy acquisition to be clear. I do not think it is ethical, but I have no other alternative in terms of how to build my clients’ rosters in a world where Meta has virtually shut down our ability to build email lists the way that we used to. That’s a—in my opinion, that’s a tired conversation from 10 years ago, but you get a lot of people who are mad about it. I don’t have a better solution than the way we’re running our programs now.

I’m constantly on the lookout for one, but we’re so drowning that we can’t figure it out a lot of the times because every Democratic Party organization is overwhelmed and overloaded and it’s even worse in the nonprofit world. Plus they’re dealing with a mentality that’s 10 years old at best.

Eric Ressler: What do you think the end game is here? Because we can’t just continuously increase volume, increase volume, increase volume. And I think there seems to be some kind of cultural change happening digitally, at least from my vantage point around people feeling overwhelmed, people intentionally kind of unplugging a little bit more, which I think is very good and much more needed. I mean, maybe let’s just open this up outside of the nonprofit space, outside of the social impact space. How are you thinking right now about digital culture and the digital landscape and the intersection of that and just, I would say, our humanity at large.

Mike Nellis: Yeah, so I’ll split this up. The first thing is there’s the assumption that there’s eventually going to be a breaking point and everything’s going to change. I don’t know that there will be a breaking point and everything will change. People can put up with a lot, people do put up with a lot.

We’re living in a society right now that is, in my opinion, just broadly mentally unwell and a lot of that has to do with algorithms and volume and the content that people are experiencing in 45-second increments on their TikTok and the incentive structures that exist for the type of content that creators create. And that is a really serious issue.

The social media companies and the billionaires who own these algorithms are not going to self-regulate themselves into doing something better. This version of the federal government is not going to solve that problem. Maybe a Democratic version will, but I’m also pretty skeptical about that because the Democratic Party is struggling to articulate or be able to solve any of the problems it wants to solve that are higher up the food chain, but this needs to move higher up the food chain, frankly, I think for the Democratic Party too, because it’s a pretty serious issue. So there’s that.

Right now you can take personal responsibility for your digital wellbeing. That’s the answer. I spend less time—I was off social media for years. I did. I missed TikTok entirely as it rose. I came back into social media and I was still looking for Vine. And now I know what TikTok is. I’m on TikTok. I’ve got 50,000 followers or something like that. So it’s not unsuccessful, but it is a platform that I’m uncomfortable with because typically when I’m thinking social media, I go to YouTube because the YouTube algorithm has me pegged.

I think people have to decide for their own mental wellbeing, what it’s going to be like, because we’re living through an era of self-regulation and self-ethics. And again, billionaires and big tech companies, they’re not going to regulate, they’re not going to protect our kids, they’re not going to protect ourselves. I think you’re going to have more and more bad faith actors who take advantage of the situation.

And the thing is, I would argue that my firm in this space is the most ethical actor that exists. We take every precaution that we can. We’re very thoughtful about the programs that we run. We get pushed in directions that we don’t want to by the market forces. And that is the bad faith actors who overwhelm.

Impersonation is a huge issue for us. We did Cory Booker’s online fundraising when he did that filibuster. We had to wait until we could fundraise until after Cory was done, because it would have been inappropriate for us to have been fundraising while it’s happening. Well, a bunch of Democratic Party, quote unquote, aligned organizations went live with content and ads and they were raking money claiming that it was going to Cory Booker and we probably lost a couple million dollars I bet that’s now in the pocket of a consultant that has another house in Maui somewhere.

So that’s the type of stuff that is wrong and it requires us as the good faith actors to be more aggressive and to bend our ethics because we have goals and expectations that we have to hit for our clients too. So I just don’t know, there’s been—my entire career since we started, I mean I’m basically one of the first generation of people to do this 20 years ago.

People have been saying email’s going to die, we’re going to hit the cliff, it’s going to be bad, and then it just doesn’t. People sort of amend to it. So I’m not saying it won’t happen to be clear, I just feel like every three years there’s some prediction that we’re hitting a turning point and then we don’t. And I sort of am skeptical.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, and to be clear, I actually think I agree with you and I worry about the trajectory because I’ve also been observing digital culture basically as I’ve been growing up. And there’s a lot about it that’s awesome, right? And there’s new spaces out there. I think Substack is one of them that, you know, not a perfect platform, but a lot of things that I like about it compared to some of the others, right? Especially from the tech side. So—

Mike Nellis: If you’ve ever done a live, you know it’s not a perfect—my God, I love them. I love Substack so much to be clear. Don’t kick me off the platform, but the live function needs work.

Eric Ressler: Hopefully some improvements coming there. Nonetheless though, we’re seeing everything get kind of chopped down and clipped down into shorter and shorter sound bites with less and less depth. And at the same time, in parallel, people have no problem listening to a three hour Joe Rogan podcast. So there’s this kind of narrative that everything is short form, everything is short form, long form is dead. People still watch long movies, people still read books, although that’s certainly down. So there’s this just weird amalgam of different types of content. And I think people are searching for stuff that’s true and that’s becoming harder and harder to find.

And as AI comes in and there’s more deep fakes and clips cut out of context and algorithms feeding outrage, it’s just a messy world out there. And I’m definitely seeing people struggle, especially in the social impact space around how do we show up right now in a way that actually works? I think there’s this perception that in order to win in this attention economy, in order to do this work well, we just have to have this big team and we need to have all these resources and time and money. And there’s some truth to that, right? If you treat this as a side project and this kind of, let’s get the intern to do it, how hard could it be to send some social posts out? It’s not going to work.

But at the same time, I think some of the most successful campaigns have been done by a small group of really smart people who care about the work and do it well. To use you as an example, you’ve built a Substack following of over a million people. And as far as I understand, it’s mostly just you doing a lot of it. I know you have some a small team supporting you, but maybe you could just talk about what that trajectory has looked like for you and how you think about showing up and growing that following in a meaningful way.

Mike Nellis: Yeah, I have no team supporting me. I mean, I have an assistant that helps with scheduling stuff, but we just hired a community manager to help scale up our content because again, I need to be posting more than I am. The truth is I post—I treat Substack a lot more like a blog. So I post rants, not newsletters. But so usually there’s two a week, but based on the response, I could probably send five a week. And I think people would tolerate that type of volume because again, the news media and the landscape is changing so much that people have an expectation of hearing from you so regularly. People forget who you are like that.

So you got to be a lot more aggressive. I want to go back to something you just said though on, you know, people tolerate a three hour Joe Rogan interview and then they’re also looking for things in 15 second increments. There’s different audiences of people and I think you have to understand who your audiences are.

But one thing that Rogan is exceptionally good at, and I described this to somebody on the Harris campaign last year, is trying to explain why they should do Rogan, is that it isn’t just Rogan’s podcast. Yes, Joe Rogan sits down for three hours with God knows who talking about God knows what and I don’t know, maybe half the time it’s pretty good and the other half of the time it’s ridiculous stuff. But there’s a whole economy under Joe Rogan.

So there’s the Rogan accounts that get that out, push their stuff, they get it on Spotify, they make a ton of money. But then there are all kinds of clip factories out there that are posting short form clips. I would argue that the way most Americans experience Joe Rogan is not through the show properly. It’s through these, you know, minute and a half clips that they get of a back and forth and stuff like that and people interspersing him into—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this one. He has one where he’s like, Jamie, pull up that video of that crazy thing that happened and people will grab that and then they’ll put something else that they want there.

I’m going to actually start doing that myself, because I want to see if it’s successful for my stuff to do that and then cut immediately to Trump trying to pronounce Semaglutide this week, which if you haven’t watched that, I highly recommend it, it’s hilarious. Honestly, it was one of those times where I was like, somebody help him, please, I feel bad for him right now. But so there’s a lot of that and I think people have to understand, go look at my show.

You asked me about my show, so I’ll answer it. I go live basically twice a day for about 30 minutes to an hour with somebody. I try to have a meaningful, interesting conversation with them. The general vibe I wanted to be is that if this person and I were sitting at a bar drinking a beer, talking about our day, it would not be dissimilar if we were reacting to the news of the day. Because I’m not bringing a character. That’s the other thing is a lot of people develop a persona and a character of themselves that they get. And I might dial it up 10% or dial it back 10% depending upon the topic.

But I tell people this all the time—can I curse on this show, Eric?

Eric Ressler: Sure, all right.

Mike Nellis: I’m the same asshole in every room. Every single room. It’s something my father used to say to me. My father would be like, I’m not a different asshole when I go over there. I’m not a different asshole here. I’m the same guy. If I’m on a work call, that’s who I am. When you watch my show, that’s who I am. When I’m on Jesse Watters, fighting with Jesse Watters, that’s the same thing. Now I’m a little bit different, but I don’t have a character.

You know, Bill Maher has that sort of famous moment where he went to have dinner with Donald Trump and he was like, Trump is so different than you would expect when he’s on TV. And I’m like, yeah, no kidding. He’s playing a WWE character. He’s the heel. So we need a lot less of that. And I think people are trying to snuff that stuff out. So they’re looking for people that they can relate to who are real.

It’s why Rogan is successful. I believe that’s the real Joe Rogan. I believe that’s the real Theo Von when I watch his show. And because of that, it makes the conversations a lot more interesting. I think if you do that and you come in with consistency, you can get a following. And it might not be a big following, but I would rather have 5,000 hardcore people that are with me every day than 2 million people that maybe show up every now and again.

And there are a lot of YouTube channels that I’ve seen, and I don’t know if they paid for this, where there’ll be people that are prominent, you know, progressives or conservatives, and they have 2 million on YouTube, and you go look at their views, and their views are less than mine. And I have 2,500 on YouTube. I do not have a big YouTube page.

So I just think that the algorithm matters here, but also the connection and the intensity matters a lot here and I think you should—the other concept that I have that I think is useful is, and I haven’t fully been able to execute this for my own, because I need help. I need a small team of people, it’s why I’m bringing on a community manager, I’m trying to hire a video editor right now too, is I believe in the—this is what I call it, is the Russian nesting doll theory of content. And I’m pretty sure I came up with this, but if I didn’t and I’m stealing it from somebody, I apologize, because I can’t remember anymore.

But it’s you know, Russian nesting doll, you pull it out, there’s all other things pulled out. So I have Endless Urgency the Show, I’m on for an hour, I pop that up, it’s TikToks, I pop that out, throw it into an AI thing, and I have tweets, I pop it out in here. And I’ve gotten some of that going so I can build a model of it, it makes me more efficient. But that’s what you want.

So I think if you’re a one person shop or a two person shop, you’re running a congressional campaign, go live once a day, at the end of the day, talk about what’s going on, bring on a guest if you can, build that connection on a Substack, then distribute those clips throughout and you can do that. You don’t have to be—when we did Adam Schiff, he had a full video team. Mallory McMorrow has an amazing video team on her campaign right now that put out that Super Bowl, or not Super Bowl, the NFL Red Zone ad that everybody liked so much. That was real work that went into that. That was art. There was art to that that was really cool.

I’m not capable of making that, but if you need me to shoot a 45 second TikTok video, I could do that and yell at the screen and call Donald Trump the most corrupt president in American history, which I do pretty frequently. This is different. Do what you can, but consistency matters the most with these tools.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, I want to pull on that thread a little bit more because I think specifically what you said around, I’m the same asshole in every room. And there’s been a lot of discussion about that as it relates to specifically Democratic candidates. But I actually think we need more of that in the nonprofit space too, not necessarily that they’re assholes, but—

Mike Nellis: And I’m not really an asshole either. You will find people who will tell you that I’m an asshole. Sure they exist. My wife is probably among them.

Eric Ressler: The point being though that there’s this professionalization and academia kind of mentality in the nonprofit space that I think is rooted in good, right? It should be serious work, especially when we’re talking about big social issues. I want true researchers on those teams. I want academics on those teams, but that kind of communication just does not work anymore.

I don’t know if it ever really worked, but it especially doesn’t work right now. And I think that we need more nonprofit executive directors who are out there making content in this way instead of sending the monthly digest style newsletter about their annual report or whatever. And it just seems like there’s a reluctance from some leaders, not all leaders, to be able to show up that way. But when I see examples of leaders who are showing up that way, it seems to be significantly more effective and doesn’t require these big teams to create these super polished branded videos.

Mike Nellis: Yeah, I think you need people who can talk like a regular human being. And I don’t think that it’s—I think there’s an assumption that America is getting dumber or something like that. I don’t really think that that’s what it is, that people’s attention spans are shorter. They’re being trained to be shorter. And they’re also deeply skeptical of intellectuals right now. Like it or not, one of the institutions that has let people down is academia. And I think there’s now a distrust of academia.

And when you have conversations with people, the more that you’re like, the Harvard Law put this study out that said blah, blah, blah. People are like, okay, whatever. Do I even know that’s real anymore? It’s what leads to people running towards an RFK Jr. who is a quack. And you know I often say about MAHA is the bottom third of MAHA makes a lot of sense to me. There’s some stuff in there about red food dye and sugar and things like that. I mean, I used to weigh 600 pounds. So I think that’s a real thing. But then he’ll be like, Tylenol causes autism, which there’s really no actual link to and is to me pretty dangerous.

So you need smart people in the room who know what they’re talking about and understand the research and I listen to those people but part of my job is I’m not an intellectual. I talk I think a lot more like a regular person than not. My job is to distill that and help other people understand it. So you need—if I was thinking about who I want to be the CEO or the public face of my nonprofit, I would be thinking about somebody who could make a donor call. I’d be thinking about somebody who could do a TikTok. I’d be thinking about somebody that could go on TV and do the press. I would make sure that they were surrounded by really smart people that were forming the policy.

But you mentioned the Democratic Party having this problem, and I’ll just give the sort of treatise that I have on this is Donald Trump, when he ran for president, was like, build the wall, drain the swamp, no tax on tips, very simple stuff. He might’ve said a lot of crazy stuff around it, but people got the four or five messages that were most important to them because they were three words long. Bernie Sanders was the same way. Medicare for all, free college, like those are very basic principles. People care a lot more about that than anything than they do about anything else that they can understand what you’re running for.

Zohran Mamdani, Freeze the Rent, I think is the best TV ad I’ve seen since the They/Them ad with Donald Trump, which is also a very simple basic ad that I think tanked Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, frankly. And I know a lot of people think that that’s overselling it, but I actually really believe that based on the research that I’ve seen.

Democrats need to do that because the reverse is we go, we have the blah, blah, blah act. And with the blah, blah, blah act, you can file Form 72B with the IRS, make sure by the way you file it on a yellow sheet of paper and if you file it correctly at this time when the lunar eclipse is like this, you can get a 37 cent tax rebate. And it’s like, what is that? And that happens every single time with the Democratic Party.

And so that’s kind of why we’re struggling right now. People are like, can we articulate the vision for the party? Well, no, we can’t because the thinkers, the academics, the policy tank folks have good ideas and good policies, but they need to be a lot more actionable and they need to be simpler to explain. I think in the nonprofit world, it’s got to be the same. The simpler that you can make it, the better.

I liken it sometimes to the difference between the guy who founded Savannah Bananas and the guy who is currently the Major League Baseball Commissioner. It’s just entirely two different people. They’re the same relative to the leagues that they have, but look at how different they are. And what’s the name of the—is the MLB commissioner still Rob Manfred? I think it is.

Eric Ressler: You’re asking the wrong dude.

Mike Nellis: Yeah, somebody out there will fact check me on that. I don’t remember. But the Savannah Bananas guy whose name I don’t know. But if I saw him, because he’s always in a yellow suit, I remember that guy. I don’t think you have to go full Savannah Bananas to be interesting, but you can find your version of that. But that’s how you get people interested in it. They’re taking an existing thing that people find boring and they’re putting a new flip on it. And to me, it’s pro wrestling baseball.

But we’re in pro wrestling politics right now, so I think people need to sort of be mindful of the fact that that’s where society’s moving and we got to be more interesting to get attention.

Eric Ressler: I’d be curious to hear kind of your theory of how social change does or should happen, especially in America, where there used to be in a good faith way, and maybe not always very effective, this kind of partnership between the federal government, state, local governments, and community-based organizations and nonprofits to enact a lot of that social change.

The entire playing field is very different right now with the current administration and basically all, not all, but most federal funding, especially for anything progressive being either completely cut or frozen. And it’s leaving our sector sort of scrambling for funding in a lot of ways. And a lot of that funding is now moving towards individual donors, major donors, some philanthropies, although philanthropy has not really stepped up to fill the gap and isn’t even capable. So how are you thinking about—

Mike Nellis: Because they’re under attack too. Yeah.

Eric Ressler: Obviously, if you’re especially trying to do any kind of progressive change, anything that is under scrutiny or under attack by the current administration, this change is still important, if not more important than ever, and it’s harder to get funding from and support from the federal government for that change. What are you seeing from your vantage point around, you know, in a tactical way, how to get over that, but just in a bigger picture cultural change way, how do you think we need to fix politics in order to, if that’s even possible now, to get through some of these bigger social changes that we want to see or is the way that we need to enact social change going to just shift because of this? How are you feeling and thinking about all of that in a bigger picture way right now?

Mike Nellis: Yeah. If you look at the history of American politics, the history of politics period, there are ebbs and flows where things function and don’t function. And is this the worst it’s ever been? Maybe. I don’t know. I think you really sit back. You can look at other administrations in the past and go, that was rough. And people did not trust each other. And sometimes it was there was massive distrust with the federal government, but the federal government was right. I mean, time tells all.

I mean, there was plenty of times where southern states did not trust the federal government to the point where they seceded from the union. So it isn’t that bad yet. So I just always remind people put it into context. It is bad. Don’t get me wrong. And it is hindering progress in this country. And I’m generally somebody who believes that Donald Trump is a fascist, is a wannabe dictator. I use those terms with intentionality. And that is an issue that’s impacting all of us.

And now I go the opposite way. I think that the way society often incentivizes us, the way the algorithms incentivize us to be focused on the big things in the world that we cannot control. So national politics, D.C. Even major things like Palestine and the Sudan and what’s happening in both those countries is horrible. But people get so focused on that and you can’t really do anything about it. Which is not to say that collective action isn’t important, collective action is absolutely important.

I encourage people a lot of times, this is what I do in my own personal life, just try to—how I think about it is my dad when I was a kid, my dad’s a big Republican, I’m left of center, I think I don’t really—I wouldn’t call myself a liberal, but I’m left of center. So my dad would say, my responsibility is to take care of myself and my family. He’d put his fist up like this and he’d go, this is just the five of us that we have to take care of. And I always thought that was a little selfish.

As I’ve gotten older and I have my family, I think it’s more right than it’s wrong, but it’s limited in the way it works. So I think about it as I got to take care of myself and be—and I say this as somebody that I didn’t take care of myself for years. I was so committed to the work and I had mental health issues that I ballooned up to 600 pounds. So I needed to get focused on my physical health, my mental health, my digital health, my spiritual health, et cetera, to then be useful to my family.

So think about it like a concentric circle. So I’m now useful to my family and I can take care of my son, I can take care of my wife, et cetera. Then I could focus on my community, then I could focus on everything else. And I think more people need to think that way because I can’t stop Donald Trump from being the tyrant that he is, cutting off people’s funding, not listening to Congress, ignoring the Supreme Court. Those things are horrible. And again, collective action is really important and that should be part of how you’re positioning yourself as a citizen.

But a lot of times you go this way down and so you ignore your physical and mental health, you ignore your family, you ignore your community when you could strengthen all those relationships. And my general theory of the case right now is you want to make the world a better place, you want to solve a lot of problems, you start bottom up. And so you start with yourself, you make yourself mentally strong, physically strong, you make sure your family’s in a good place, you raise good kids, you be the partner and spouse you want to be, be the friend you want to be, you fix the shit in your community that’s actually fixable.

And so I ran for school council down the street. There’s a small school over here, my son doesn’t go to it, they needed a community rep. I got elected by about 10 teachers and parents. And my job is to source beanbag chairs for the sensory room for the kids that need it and help them get the money for a TA and stuff like that. And I genuinely, I get more value in my own life out of it. It’s selfish a little more than a little bit. But I also think that work is more important than a lot of the going on Jesse Watters and arguing with him in front of four and a half million people.

That’s the stuff that people see and that people care about that. I do it because it’s important and I do it because it draws new followers, which then helps me with the rest of the messaging and things I want to get out. But I think what I do there is more. And I think I’m more fulfilled by that. So I think if you’re lost in this, maybe—I don’t know if this is answering your question, Eric, because I don’t have a solution for nonprofits, I’m sorry.

But if you’re lost in this moment and you’re frustrated with whatever it is, you might be frustrated from the right too. You might be a conservative going, this isn’t what I want either. Go pick up trash in your neighborhood. Go be useful somewhere there. I just think if more people did that, we’d actually be in a better position. And if we had more people who did that, we’d have a better crop of leaders on both sides who would eventually run for city council and mayor and Congress and Senate because they have actually been in their community instead of what we have is a lot of pseudo celebrities and influencers that are now using it as a stepping stone to become a Fox News host or an MSNBC host and I’m tired of that shit too.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, I want to end before we wrap up, just kind of, if you’re open to it, talking a little bit how you’re thinking about the next generation. We’re in this generational change, both in terms of leadership, but also another new generation of kids growing up. And you’re a dad, I’m a dad also of some young kids. And I think a lot about all of this as it relates to what does their future look like. And I’ll be honest, there are times that I’m very pessimistic about what that looks like. Bigger things like climate change and all the political violence that’s happening right now and just the general ecosystem.

I drop my kids off at school and I have to, in the back of my brain, think is this going to be a school shooting day and am I going to be affected by that, right? These are things that are not symptomatic of a healthy society. And I don’t think it’s constructive to spin out on that stuff, even though it is rooted in truth.

It makes me energized around how can we create a better future for our kids, which I think ultimately what everyone wants even if they’re really misguided around what that looks like or if there’s different opinions around what that better future looks like. I mean that is in a good way it’s kind of the American experiment that I hope that we can continue to work towards together in some kind of constructive way even though there’s been a lot of polarization and the trajectory has not been good but back to my question.

How are you thinking about, you know, you mentioned taking care of yourself first, taking care of your family next, raising kids in this environment and doing that constructively and doing that in a way that builds community and builds character and sets up that next generation for success.

Mike Nellis: Yeah, I spend a ton of time thinking about how to raise a good man. I mean, the joke with my wife when we got the news that we were having a boy, I remember we were riding an Uber back to the house and I remember going, we’re having a white man. And it was sort of during all the Black Lives Matter stuff, so it was a little bit more topical than today, although I still think it’s really topical today. But I want to raise a good man.

And I think we’re watching a world that is dominated by the worst possible role models and the President of the United States is Donald Trump and I think he’s not a good role model for anyone. You just look at his own kids to find that he’s not a good role model for anyone. And beyond that, it’s who are the loudest, most successful voices talking to young men right now? It’s Andrew Tate. And Andrew Tate is a dangerous individual. Now he is a symptom of a system that doesn’t work.

And we’re also raising the first generation of young men who are going to make less money than their female counterparts. I mean, women are twice as likely to graduate from college, twice as likely to buy a house right now under 30. That’s crazy. It’s the first time it’s happened in American history. We should not do anything to get in the way of that, because it’s incredible progress. But I think we need to make sure that men see their path in the future too. Otherwise, they’re going to listen to people like Andrew Tate, and Andrew Tate preaches violence against women.

So I think about that a lot, what you said about school shootings hit me too. My son had his active shooter drill, his second one a couple of weeks ago and I don’t like that happening. I don’t like getting that email and I don’t like answering those questions when he comes home. And I don’t know, but again, I think it’s I don’t have control over school shootings. I can’t stop a random person from getting access to a firearm in a country where it’s really easy to get a gun. I mean, I’m a gun owner. I own a Glock 19. I went and bought it. I trained with it. I know how to use it, but I know how easy it is to get a gun. It is not hard.

And honestly, I got a little bit frustrated by the three day waiting period because I didn’t want to have to drive back out to the suburbs to get it. But I was like, no, I need this. This should probably be a five day waiting period. You can’t control it. So focus on what you can control. Make sure your kids are smart, empathetic, get good educations, that you’re there and present in their lives. I just feel like that’s—to me is I also I’m a joyful warrior. I refuse to be miserable.

In the first Trump term, I became a very miserable person and it had huge ramifications on the parent that I became, the father that I was, the human being, the boss that I became. I didn’t like any of it. I’m not doing that this time. I choose to be joyful in the face of death threats. I choose to be joyful in the face of all the political violence happening around us and the way that they’re framing the left right now as being responsible for that political violence, which to anybody listening is ridiculous. Both sides are responsible for what’s happening right now and both sides should be trying to do better.

But I think you just push forward one step at a time and you don’t give up. Because I’ll also say to the forces who want to take this country in a direction that I don’t think Eric, you or I agree that it should go in. They want you to quit. They want you to become cold. They want you to become lifeless. They want you to lock down and you can’t do that either. We need more people that keep their heart and keep their soul.

One of my biggest fears when I’m up late at night thinking about the future of the Democratic Party, which for some reason is one of the biggest things I think about all the time, which would, if you’d explained that to me when I was 14 would make no sense to me. Because I wanted to be a football coach. I was going to be a football coach. That was what I wanted to be. And I worry the Democratic Party becomes the mirror image version of the Republican Party where the Republican Party’s party of grievances. They don’t care about how they’re going to solve people’s problems.

When was the last time the Republican Party presented a solution on anything? They’ve passed no laws in the last nine months. None. They’re just outsourcing everything to executive actions, and they can complain about Joe Biden signing EAs. What Trump has done is ridiculous. The Democratic Party has a lot of solutions. People don’t believe we can get them done. Oftentimes they’re complicated and they’re disaffected from people’s day to day lives. That’s a different problem. At least there’s solutions. At least they’re trying to help people.

And I get asked this all the time when I do these media hits, it’s why are you a Democrat? The answer is it’s the only party that gives a shit about whether or not you have a good paying job and can live the life that you want and retire with dignity and have a vacation every now and again. And unless that becomes not the case, I will remain a Democrat till the end of time. And we got to fight, we got to hold onto that. And we got to get better, tougher, stronger about the things that we’re doing.

Nonprofits have to get better, stronger, tougher about the things that they’re doing, but not lose sight of the mission because there’s a reason we wake up every morning and care about this. You or I or anybody else listening to this could probably be working somewhere else, making more money, and clocking out earlier than we do in the jobs that we have now.

Eric Ressler: I think that’s a beautiful place to end. Mike, thank you so much for your time today. Where would you like our listeners to dig deeper, follow you, subscribe, et cetera?

Mike Nellis: Yeah, you can find me on any major social media platform, but mostly my Substack, endlessurgency.com, if you’d like to subscribe.

Eric Ressler: Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike.

Mike Nellis: Thanks for having me.